I wanted to like awk and tried really hard but in the end was disappointed by what I see as unnecessary complications or limitations in the language. For exampl

I wanted to like awk and tried really hard but in the end was disappointed by what I see as unnecessary complications or limitations in the language. For example, it has first class support for regexes but only for matching. You can’t do ‘s/foo/bar’. I also found string manipulation to be cumbersome with the string functions. I would have expected a string processing language to have better primitives for this. And function arguments/variables are just a mess, it’s hard to understand how they came up with that design. It’s also quirky and unintuitive in some places you would not expect. Take the non-working example from the article: awk -v FS=';' -v OFS=',' 1 I expect this to change the change the separator in the output. Period. The “efficiency” argument for why it doesn’t work just doesn’t cut it for me. First, it’s very simple to do a one time comparison of FS and OFS, if they are different then you know you know you _have_ to perform the change, because the user is asking you! If I do this in reality and it doesn’t work I just switch over to sed or perl and call it a day. All in all, perl -eP is a better awk. And for data processing I switched to miller. It has it’s idiosyncrasies as well but it’s much better for working with structured records.